Linux is struggling on the desktop because it only has a small number of "great" apps, according to the Gnome co-creator. Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the Gnome desktop, told tech journalist Tim Anderson at the recent Windows 8 Build conference "When you count how many great desktop apps there are on Linux, you can probably name 10," de Icaza said, according to a post on Anderson's IT Writing blog. "You work really hard, you can probably name 20. We've managed to p*** off developers every step of the way, breaking APIs all the time."

"If one gets a desktop Linux LiveCD today, and installs it on a bare machine, it will work instantly out of the box. Yes, I repeat, it will "just work".

Not in my experience. Any hardware that is the slightest bit new, and Linux is likely to fail in "interesting" ways. For example, in 2009 I built a new desktop system using a Gigabyte X58 motherboard, Core i7 920 and a pair of SATA Velociraptor drives. None of the Linux distributions could run it. I had to custom-compile the latest Linux -rc versions just to get the SATA drivers. Then I needed binary ATI video drivers because the open source drivers couldn't handle the card. This year I got a Samsung Series 9 laptop. Very nice, but no optical drive. So, off I went to boot a Fedora Live CD from a USB stick. Should be easy right? There's even a tool for it. Heck no. The Live CD assumes that the media (the USB key in this case) will have the same volume name that the CD was burned with. Took me a couple of hours to figure that one out! Then there were all the problems, like reboot crashing the machine (had to add reboot=k), and the LED flashing after a crash preventing the power-off key from working (had to add another kernel option to fix that) and EXT4 defaulting to not using TRIM on the SSD. So, to repeat: In my personal experience with Linux, which I like a lot, it takes a software engineer and sysadmin to make Linux "just work." "

Get real. Who exactly are you trying to kid?

Firstly, if one were to do for Linux the same as one did for Windows, and buy it pre-installed on a machine designed to run it, then Linux too would "just work". It would "just work" very well indeed, and unlike Windows it would continue to work very well. It would not get slower with time, and it would be quite unlikely to ever get compromised by malware.

For self-installed Linux, one puts in a LiveCD, and on 95% of machines it will indeed "just work". Of the existing machines out there today, a current desktop Linux distribution tailored for that class of machine will "just work" far more often than any current version of Windows. These are machines designed for Windows, mind you. Linux is far, far easier to self-install and get to a satisfactory working state than Windows is.

Linux has more working drivers for more hardware than any other OS on the planet, by quite a long way. Linux runs on more hardware than any other OS.